ONC Personnel Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Business office of the Nationwide Coordinator is launching a new site collection showcasing ONC team called Within ONC. Within ONC will highlight an inclusive landscape of ONC employees customers, a selection of positions, and the various backgrounds of those people performing in just ONC. 

Name: Carmen Smiley
ONC Office: Office of Engineering, Specifications Division
Title: IT Expert

How does your division/business office healthy into ONC?

The Standards Division functions as the major source for standards analysis, progress, improvement, and complex support for ONC, federal and condition partners, and other stakeholders throughout the wellbeing treatment marketplace.

Convey to us about your operate at ONC.

I lead and coordinate projects involving client matching and pharmacy interoperability. My do the job connects me with all kinds of individuals – from my ONC colleagues to federal partners to numerous marketplace stakeholders – giving them with steering, technological assistance, and analysis. I’m also the staff members guide for Challenge [email protected], a new, industry-led “tech spec” that could be made use of across industry for representing client addresses. You might have recently witnessed me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Benchmarks Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Fast Identification & Matching Tiger Workforce.

What has led you to your job here at ONC?

Although performing at the Indian Wellness Services and Children’s Countrywide Healthcare facility in DC, my colleagues and I confronted considerable issues with wellness IT adoption, implementation, maintenance, examination, reporting, and interoperability. At the very same time, I saw endless options in what the long term could search like for overall health info, client matching and record linkage, and other regions. Despite the fact that I found my function worthwhile, I actively sought out alternatives to help handle these obstacle and devise remedies to progress the market as a total. When I used to my latest situation, it was my 200^th software for a federal job. I leverage that same perseverance in my do the job each and every working day.

What abilities and strengths do you maintain that add benefit to your get the job done portfolio?

I’m educated in anthropology, analysis, and data science, so I have a exclusive capacity to see troubles and alternatives from a non-specialized and technical viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, unbiased, curious, and I appreciate problem solving. I have about 26 years of encounter in healthcare and have lived and labored on four continents.

What is a get the job done-related accomplishment you are most proud of? & Why?

I have experienced several accomplishments around the yrs at ONC that I am very pleased of, but just one recent accomplishment is the release of the Challenge [email protected] Technological Specification and Companion Information in January 2022. The finest feat of Challenge [email protected] was not essentially the growth and publication of the specification and guidebook, but the potential to coalesce and obtain consensus between a vast vary of stakeholders on how to capture and characterize addresses across the industry.

What would you say is the most effective element of doing work for ONC?

Some of the greatest elements of working for ONC is the autonomy I have about my work and the capability to constantly find out.

How would you characterize ONC’s achievements?

I consider ONC’s achievements may well be in the beneficial affect our perform has experienced on federal agencies and the market as they perform toward standards adoption and interoperability.

What is a venture you are now doing the job on and how does it healthy into ONC mission?

A person venture that I am functioning on is USCDI as the Client Demographics Information Class Direct. The USCDI is a standardized set of health facts lessons and features for nationwide interoperable overall health trade. Substantially of my work on USCDI requires partaking stakeholders, adjudicating public comments, conducting exploration, and working to add new, large-worth info components to support client matching and file linkage, identity integrity, and fairness. Accurate affected individual matching is a foundational necessity for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC assistance your qualified enhancement?

I’ve had various chances around the decades to acquire on new tasks in regions absolutely unfamiliar to me, lending opportunities to acquire relationships with a assortment of men and women and corporations, see health IT from diverse perspectives, achieve know-how and techniques, and guide federal associates and other sector stakeholders.

What are the main values of ONC that are significant to you?

The ONC main worth that may possibly be most normally used in follow each and every working day is teamwork. We work alongside one another on a range of challenges that are very complicated and as a result depend on a multidisciplinary group to address.  We attain our entire probable when we work jointly, relying on our individual strengths to reach our collective greatest.

Are there any extra rewards of functioning at ONC that you’d like to mention?

The possibility to direct meaningful work and probable to have nationwide effects.